No Arabic abstract
The theory for multiplier empirical processes has been one of the central topics in the development of the classical theory of empirical processes, due to its wide applicability to various statistical problems. In this paper, we develop theory and tools for studying multiplier $U$-processes, a natural higher-order generalization of the multiplier empirical processes. To this end, we develop a multiplier inequality that quantifies the moduli of continuity of the multiplier $U$-process in terms of that of the (decoupled) symmetrized $U$-process. The new inequality finds a variety of applications including (i) multiplier and bootstrap central limit theorems for $U$-processes, (ii) general theory for bootstrap $M$-estimators based on $U$-statistics, and (iii) theory for $M$-estimation under general complex sampling designs, again based on $U$-statistics.
Bayesian nonparametric hierarchical priors are highly effective in providing flexible models for latent data structures exhibiting sharing of information between and across groups. Most prominent is the Hierarchical Dirichlet Process (HDP), and its subsequent variants, which model latent clustering between and across groups. The HDP, may be viewed as a more flexible extension of Latent Dirichlet Allocation models (LDA), and has been applied to, for example, topic modelling, natural language processing, and datasets arising in health-care. We focus on analogous latent feature allocation models, where the data structures correspond to multisets or unbounded sparse matrices. The fundamental development in this regard is the Hierarchical Indian Buffet process (HIBP), which utilizes a hierarchy of Beta processes over J groups, where each group generates binary random matrices, reflecting within group sharing of features, according to beta-Bernoulli IBP priors. To encompass HI
We consider the limit distribution of maxima of periodograms for stationary processes. Our method is based on $m$-dependent approximation for stationary processes and a moderate deviation result.
Suppose that particles are randomly distributed in $bR^d$, and they are subject to identical stochastic motion independently of each other. The Smoluchowski process describes fluctuations of the number of particles in an observation region over time. This paper studies properties of the Smoluchowski processes and considers related statistical problems. In the first part of the paper we revisit probabilistic properties of the Smoluchowski process in a unified and principled way: explicit formulas for generating functionals and moments are derived, conditions for stationarity and Gaussian approximation are discussed, and relations to other stochastic models are highlighted. The second part deals with statistics of the Smoluchowki processes. We consider two different models of the particle displacement process: the undeviated uniform motion (when a particle moves with random constant velocity along a straight line) and the Brownian motion displacement. In the setting of the undeviated uniform motion we study the problems of estimating the mean speed and the speed distribution, while for the Brownian displacement model the problem of estimating the diffusion coefficient is considered. In all these settings we develop estimators with provable accuracy guarantees.
Efficient automatic protein classification is of central importance in genomic annotation. As an independent way to check the reliability of the classification, we propose a statistical approach to test if two sets of protein domain sequences coming from two families of the Pfam database are significantly different. We model protein sequences as realizations of Variable Length Markov Chains (VLMC) and we use the context trees as a signature of each protein family. Our approach is based on a Kolmogorov--Smirnov-type goodness-of-fit test proposed by Balding et al. [Limit theorems for sequences of random trees (2008), DOI: 10.1007/s11749-008-0092-z]. The test statistic is a supremum over the space of trees of a function of the two samples; its computation grows, in principle, exponentially fast with the maximal number of nodes of the potential trees. We show how to transform this problem into a max-flow over a related graph which can be solved using a Ford--Fulkerson algorithm in polynomial time on that number. We apply the test to 10 randomly chosen protein domain families from the seed of Pfam-A database (high quality, manually curated families). The test shows that the distributions of context trees coming from different families are significantly different. We emphasize that this is a novel mathematical approach to validate the automatic clustering of sequences in any context. We also study the performance of the test via simulations on Galton--Watson related processes.
In the last decade, sequential Monte-Carlo methods (SMC) emerged as a key tool in computational statistics. These algorithms approximate a sequence of distributions by a sequence of weighted empirical measures associated to a weighted population of particles. These particles and weights are generated recursively according to elementary transformations: mutation and selection. Examples of applications include the sequential Monte-Carlo techniques to solve optimal non-linear filtering problems in state-space models, molecular simulation, genetic optimization, etc. Despite many theoretical advances the asymptotic property of these approximations remains of course a question of central interest. In this paper, we analyze sequential Monte Carlo methods from an asymptotic perspective, that is, we establish law of large numbers and invariance principle as the number of particles gets large. We introduce the concepts of weighted sample consistency and asymptotic normality, and derive conditions under which the mutation and the selection procedure used in the sequential Monte-Carlo build-up preserve these properties. To illustrate our findings, we analyze SMC algorithms to approximate the filtering distribution in state-space models. We show how our techniques allow to relax restrictive technical conditions used in previously reported works and provide grounds to analyze more sophisticated sequential sampling strategies.